Enough with the jokes about how the City Council does nothing but ceremonially rename streets. This week its members will take on the most basic of New York's indignities: the unexpected parking ticket.

Every New Yorker knows the feeling of having one's daily schedule disrupted without advance warning. You arrive at the subway station only to wait 20 minutes and realize your train is never coming, or find the F train arriving even though you were expecting the A. What, you didn't notice the little 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of white paper, covered with inscrutable details of the service change, slapped on a wall with masking tape?

While regular New Yorkers get waxed with ever-increasing parking fines, big corporations often get a pass from the city, Comptroller John Liu says in a report released today. The city has failed to collect more than $9 million in fines from these companies.

A Department of Finance official disputed the accuracy of the audit.

Under two program called "Delivery Solutions," and the Commercial Abatement Program, the city gives discounts on parking tix. To get into the programs, the firms are supposed to pay all outstanding tickets, give up their right to challenge summonses, and pay their fines within 15 days.

But Liu found that the city failed to penalize companies which didn't live up to the agreement, and let them continue to remain in the discount programs.

Having a car in the city can be trying at the least, because not only do you have to navigate the traffic on a daily basis, but even when you're not driving the car you still have to move it to make way for street-cleaning services. Lucky for car owners, life might be getting much sweeter. New York's City Council passed a measure yesterday that could potentially mean one less day per week NYC drivers have to move their cars due to alternate side parking regulations.

More than half of those thousands of precious parking permits in the city are either legal permits used illegally or simply illegitimate permits in the first place. And nearly one in four official parking permits are "illicitly photocopied, fraudulent or otherwise invalid." Those are the conclusions of a Transportation Alternatives study just released.